Jeffrey J. Kripal

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Jeffrey J. Kripal (Ph. D., University of Chicago 1993) is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA. He is the author of Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001) and Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995, 1998).

He has also co-edited volumes with Glenn W. Shuck on the history of Esalen and the American counterculture, On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture (Indiana, 2005); with Rachel Fell McDermott on a popular Hindu goddess, Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West (California, 2003); with G. William Barnard on the ethical critique of mystical traditions, Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism (Seven Bridges, 2002); and with T.G. Vaidyanathan of Bangalore, India, on the dialogue between psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (Oxford, 1999).

1 Kali's Child
2 Adi Da
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Kali's Child

Jeffrey J. Kripal's first book, Kali's Child, a highly controversial psychoanalytic study of the great Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, launched him into a heated debate; one which continues to at least some degree to the present day.

Kali's Child's primary thesis is that a great deal of Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were generated by the lingering results of childhood traumas, and sublimated homoerotic and pedophiliac passions. Kripal, however, never claims that Sri Ramakrishna actually molested children. He argues that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic."^[1]

[edit] Reception and controversy

Kali's Child won the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize in 1996, soon after its release. However, it created some controversy in India and among Hindus.

Kripal's claims offended many Hindu laymen, scholars, and religious leaders. The controversy erupted when The Statesman, a Calcutta daily, published a negative review of the book in January 1997, provoking a flurry of angry letters to the editor. An all-India daily, The Asian Age, also published a negative review in the same year. As one thing led to another, Kripal soon found himself and the book embroiled in a long-running disputation. Censoring the book was even debated (unsuccessfully) in the Parliament of India. Kripal maintains, however, that less than 100 copies have been sold in India, and that few of its opponents have actually read the book.

[edit] Kripal's response

Kripal believes that gender and spirituality are intricately linked, and that the history of mysticism in all the world's religions is often deeply erotic. He has strongly denied that Kali's Child was intended as a slur either against Ramakrishna specifically or Hinduism in general. By comparing the deeply erotic nature of Teresa of Avilla's mysticism with Ramakrishna's, for example, Kripal gave one of many examples of how, phenomenologically, European Roman Catholics were experiencing things quite similar to the raptures of Bengali ecstatics like Ramakrishna.^[2] Kripal later devoted the entirety of his second book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001) to an in-depth study of the varied aspects (both homoerotic and heteroerotic) of mystico-eroticism, as found in almost all the world’s major religious systems.

[edit] Criticism

In 2000, Swami Tyagananda, minister of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Society in Boston, wrote a 173 page rebuttal, entitled "Kali’s Child Revisited, or Didn’t Anyone Check the Documentation?" ^[3] Tyagananda criticized Kripal's translation of Bengali phrases and said that he tended to quote selectively and deceptively from the Mahendranath Gupta's Kathamrita to create evidence for his interpretation. Tyagananda also alleged that Kripal had made at least 191 translation mistakes and/or deceptions. He alleges deliberate ignoring of evidence that contradicts his thesis. Additionally, Tyagananda accused him of having only an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and no understanding of Tantra. Since both the translation of Bengali terms and Tantra play an important role in Kripal's argument, this was a serious allegation.

Kripal's response was to apologize for his translation errors (many of which had already been corrected in the book's second edition, 1998), but to maintain that they were not serious enough to damage the book's central thesis. Kripal turned down suggestions to include a summary of Tyagananda's rebuttal at the end of his book, in a new edition. Concerning the charge that he does not understand Tantra, he responded that Swami Tyagananda’s version of Tantra is the "right-handed" ascetic path, as expounded by neo-Vedanta, while the Tantra of Ramakrishna's milieu was the "left-handed" path, which integrates the sexual with the spiritual. In the second edition of Kali's Child, however, Kripal dismisses the "philosophical expositions" of Tantra as inauthentic because they are "designed to rid Tantra of everything that smacked of superstition, magic, or scandal" (28-29). He also noted that because Tyagananda questioned his personal motives for writing the book, the critique amounted to an ad hominem attack. Additionally, Kripal pointed out (following modern literary theory) that all interpretations, his own included, are products of the interaction of the reader's horizon of understanding with that of the author's.^[4]

Rajiv Malhotra joined the discussion in September 2002 with his essay titled "RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome" ^[5] (a reference to Wendy Doniger, Kripal's famous teacher). It included an as-yet-unaccepted invitation to Kripal to defend his book in a debate with Bengali scholars. It severely criticizes the standards of the book, rigour of its arguments and conclusion. It questions the persons who signed off on this Ph. D. dissertation, the standards of AAR Book Award Committee, and who glorified and endorsed his book, none of whom are Bengalis with a familiarity with the language or the cultural nuances that are at stake. He claims it to be a blatant violation of academic due process and ethical norms. He then proceeds to summarize the alleged errors in the book. Malhotra claimed that translation should not be done literally or through European pathologies, but must be based on the cultural insiders' perspectives on the connotations that words have in various native contexts. The essay also elaborated on what Malhotra sees as the many faults of, the power structures that play a role in, and the lack of NRIs, in U.S. Hinduism studies. It also challenged the legitimacy of Freudian psychoanalysis in the context of Eastern spirituality. Referring to the work of Kripal and several other Religion in South Asia (RISA) scholars, Malhotra notes that historically genocides have been preceded by the denigration of the victims and asked: "Are certain 'objective' scholars, unconsciously driven by their Eurocentric essences, to pave the way for a future genocide of a billion or more Hindus, because of economic and/or ecological pressures of over-population later during this century?" ^[6]

By late 2002 he decided to discontinue the discourse: "But there comes a time when it is time to move on. After eight years of almost constant thinking, eight published essays, a second monograph, and literally thousands of paper and virtual letters, that time has arrived for me. Accordingly, I plan no future formal responses and have long since moved on to other intellectual projects and topics."^[7] He combined his primary replies on his website, and then moved ahead with other projects.

[edit] Adi Da

In 2003, Kripal wrote a foreward to The Knee of Listening, a book by American guru Adi Da. In it he said, referring to Da's writings:

In my opinion, this latter total corpus constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language.^[8]